"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis
"I don’t believe
in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze

Note on Citations

The numerical citations refer to page number. The source's text-space (including footnote region) is divided into four equal portions, a, b, c, d. If the citation is found in one such section, then for example it would be cited p.15c. If the cited text lies at a boundary, then it would be for example p.16cd. If it spans from one section to another, it is rendered either for example p.15a.d or p.15a-d. If it goes from a 'd' section and/or arrives at an 'a' section, the letters are omitted: p.15-16.

At its simplest, the position behind the curtains is combined perfectly with the position on the ring, bar, or parallelepiped, in a Figure that is not only isolated, stuck, and contracted, but also abandoned, escaping, evanescent, and confused, as in the 1952 Study for Crouching Nude [10]. (Deleuze 2003: 22ab)

David Sylvester analyzes three general phases in the development of Francis Bacon's style. In the first one, the figure and background were both rendered in a fairly clear way. In the second 'malerisch' period, the figure and background were both made blurry, seemingly obscured by window shades. Then in the third phase, the figure is indeterminate while the background is clear. So in this last period, the two opposite conventions of the first two are brought together, the clarity of the backgrounds in the first phase, with the malerisch figures of the second. And while in the first and second phases, the figure and background were both of the same nature, in the third, they are 'violently juxtaposed', which isolates the figure from the field.

Deleuze's point is that the second period did not contradict the first one as much as it added to this predecessor. And the synthesis of the first two was already to be found in the second phase. What we see in this painting is that the figure on the one hand is blurred, indeterminate, and trying to escape into the field, and yet it is also isolated from the field, by being enclosed in a box.